BER Airport Departures: Terminal 1 or 2, security without a slot, and a detour-prone journey

Flying out of BER starts with one question, and it is quicker to answer than at most big airports: are you flying Ryanair, Vueling or Wizz Air? If so, you check in at Terminal 2. Every other airline uses Terminal 1. That is what the airport’s own airline directory says (as of September 2026): 96 entries, 93 of them marked Terminal 1 and exactly three marked Terminal 2.

Everything else here is about what happens after that fork: where your bag goes, which security lane you pick, why the BER Runway slot system has disappeared, and why getting there by train has a few traps in autumn 2026. The other direction, from the aircraft door to the city, is covered in BER Airport arrivals.

Terminal 1 or Terminal 2: three airlines make the difference

Terminal 1 is the main building, handling Lufthansa, Eurowings, easyJet, Condor, Turkish Airlines, United, Delta, Qatar Airways and practically everyone else. Terminal 2 sits right next to it; the airport puts the walk at about five minutes. According to the directory, Ryanair, Vueling and Wizz Air check in there.

Terminal 2 is less self-contained than the name suggests. It has check-in, a security checkpoint and a small plaza with shops and cafés, but no gates of its own. After security, two bridges take you across into Pier North of Terminal 1, where the departure lounges are on level E0. So you depart from Terminal 2 but board from the Terminal 1 building.

Treat the split as a snapshot. If in doubt, your flight details on the airport’s website or app show the terminal, and the airport itself asks you to check before you set off.

There is no Terminal 5, and Terminal 2 was a late starter

Two things from older travel write-ups can safely be forgotten. The first is Terminal 5, the former terminal of the old Schönefeld airport. It ran alongside BER when the new airport opened in autumn 2020, was mothballed in February 2021 when passenger numbers collapsed, and has been permanently closed since the airport company’s supervisory board decided so on 18 November 2022. The airport now puts it simply: all departures and arrivals take place in Terminals 1 and 2. If a sat-nav or an old printout sends you to the former Schönefeld terminal, you are in the wrong place.

The second is the idea that Terminal 2 was there from day one. According to the airport company it was finished at the end of September 2020 but only opened on 24 March 2022, after the pandemic kept demand too low to justify it. Ryanair was named as its main user and moved all its departures there at the end of March 2022. It has operated normally since; I found no later closure decision in the airport’s own announcements. If anything, BER’s route news points the other way, with Wizz Air adding services to places such as Sofia, Sarajevo and Milan Malpensa.

Checking in: 118 desks, 127 machines and the evening before

In Terminal 1, check-in is on level E1: ten check-in islands with 118 desks in total, plus two oversized-baggage counters. In Terminal 2 it is one floor lower on E0, with 16 desks and one oversized-baggage counter.

Fast Bag Drop is usually quicker. You print your boarding pass and bag tag at a machine, stick the tag along the long side of the case and drop it yourself at the marked belt. The airport lists 99 machines in Terminal 1 and 28 kiosks in Terminal 2. Each airline decides how early you can use them, and the spread is wide (as of 2026):

Airline	Terminal	Machines open from
Eurowings	T1	36 hours before departure
Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian	T1	24 hours
easyJet	T1	11 hours
Turkish Airlines	T1	9 hours
Ryanair	T2	2.5 hours
Wizz Air	T2	from 3:45am on the day

Not every flight is cleared for it. Connections, extra document checks or a non-Schengen destination can send you to a staffed desk instead, and excess baggage always goes to the staffed desk because that is where you pay.

From Terminal 1 you can also use the self-service bag drop in areas 511 to 516, open daily from 3:30am to 10pm. British Airways, Delta, United and Qatar Airways are excluded.

For early flights the evening-before check-in is worth knowing about. All of it is in Terminal 1:

• easyJet: 6pm to 9pm, for flights the next day up to 9:30am
• Eurowings: 6pm to 8pm, Saturdays 2pm to 4pm, for flights up to noon the next day; free at the machines, €10 per person at the desk
• Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss, Lufthansa City, Brussels: 5pm to 7:30pm, no more than 23 hours before departure, desks 421 to 426

The airport lists no equivalent for the three Terminal 2 airlines.

Security: five checkpoints, two technologies, no more slots

Until the end of May you could reserve a free security time slot at BER under the name BER Runway. Not any more: the airport stopped taking bookings on 26 May 2026. Its explanation is refreshingly candid. In the previous month, 90 per cent of passengers who had booked a slot did not use it and went through the new lanes instead. So unlike Stuttgart, where you can still book a slot, at BER you simply queue. The airport publishes waiting times in its flight information, in its app and on screens in the terminal.

You are not tied to “your” terminal’s checkpoint either. The airport says you can use any security checkpoint in Terminal 1 or Terminal 2. In Terminal 1 those are security areas 1, 2, 4 and 5, all on level E1; Terminal 2 has one area, also on E1. You scan your boarding pass to enter.

The real difference is the equipment. Areas 1 and 5 in Terminal 1 and the checkpoint in Terminal 2 have CT scanners. There, your laptop and liquids stay in your bag, and the airport allows containers of up to two litres. Areas 2 and 4 still use conventional scanners: liquids of 100ml or less in a one-litre bag, electronics out and in a separate tray. Since you cannot know in advance which lane you will get, the airport itself recommends packing to the 100ml rule anyway. I would do the same. What belongs in the bag in the first place is covered in liquids in hand luggage.

Flights to Israel and the USA involve a second security check. It opens two hours before departure and closes 30 minutes before, and the airport advises heading to the gate early.

Airside: the Marketplace, the levels and Pier North

In Terminal 1, security brings you out into the Marketplace, around 9,000 square metres of shops and cafés, from which every gate can be reached. By level: Schengen departures on E1, non-Schengen departures on E2 along with the food court and lounges, and further gates on E0. Before a flight to London, Istanbul or New York you still have passport control ahead of you, and the airport says to allow extra waiting time for it.

The airport’s own advice is one that people ignore: find out where your gate is first, then go shopping. From Terminal 2 you cross the bridges into Pier North after the plaza. It is not a long walk, but it is a different one from the Marketplace route, and anyone planning a last coffee should know there is nothing of the same scale beyond the Terminal 2 plaza.

How much time you need: an early flight worked through

The airport company recommends being in the right terminal two and a half hours before departure. That sounds generous, but at BER it is not excessive once you count the walk from the platform to check-in and, if needed, across to Terminal 2. Airline deadlines are often much tighter; United, for instance, closes check-in at BER 75 minutes before departure. That is a cut-off, not something to plan around.

An example: Wizz Air at 7am, one checked bag, departing from Terminal 2.

• 4:30am at the terminal, following the airport’s recommendation
• Wizz Air’s machines open at 3:45am, so you print your tag and boarding pass straight away
• Drop the bag, then through the CT-scanner checkpoint in Terminal 2 on E1
• Over the bridge into Pier North and at the gate in good time for boarding

If you are flying Lufthansa and live in Berlin, you can drop your case the evening before between 5pm and 7:30pm. Then the morning is just security and the gate, and the machine opening times stop mattering.

Getting there by train: FEX, S-Bahn and the autumn 2026 works

The “Flughafen BER” station sits on level U2 directly beneath Terminal 1. For Terminal 2, follow the signs from the station; the connection is on level E0.

In normal service the FEX airport express runs up to four times an hour according to the airport, taking about 23 minutes from Hauptbahnhof, 19 from Potsdamer Platz and 14 from Südkreuz. On top of that, the S9 and S85 each run every 20 minutes, along with regional trains RE20, RB22, RB24 and RB32. BER lies in fare zone C, so you need an ABC ticket: €5.00 for a single, €12.90 for a 24-hour ticket (VBB, as of 2026).

This autumn, though, normal service is not what you will get. On 22 September the airport published the following:

• FEX and RE20 will run four times an hour combined until December 2026.
• The RE20 runs as a rail replacement service between BER and Lübbenau until 2 October.
• RB24 and RB32 terminate at S Schönefeld until 5am on 28 September; change there to the S9 or S85 for the airport.
• RB22 and RB32 have partial cancellations early and late in the day, plus diversions, until mid-October.
• The Stadtbahn between Charlottenburg and Ostbahnhof is completely closed to regional and long-distance trains until 12 December 2026.

The FEX may also be diverted or partly cancelled at night. For an early flight that means checking your connection in the VBB journey planner the evening before rather than relying on memory.

Arriving by car or taxi

By car you come in on the A113 or the B96a, exit “Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg”. Important if you are flying from Terminal 2: it has no forecourt of its own. The airport suggests stopping on the arrivals level in front of Terminal 1 or using car parks P7 and P8.

The short-stay drop-off zones in front of Terminal 1 are free for ten minutes, up to three times per number plate in each of the windows midnight to 8am, 8am to 4pm and 4pm to midnight. For a longer goodbye there is the Kiss & Fly Deal: choose it at the pay machine within the first ten minutes and the first hour costs €17 instead of €23. From 1 December 2026 the airport’s car parks accept cashless payment only. If the car is staying for the whole trip, this guide to BER’s car parks and what they cost shows which one suits which length of stay.

By taxi, departing passengers are dropped on level E1 outside Terminal 1. For a rough idea of the fare from your part of town, see the BER table of distances, drive times and indicative fares. Whether a pre-booked fixed-price transfer works out better is set out in this comparison of Berlin airport transfer prices.

One comparison to finish, because it puts BER’s situation in perspective. At Frankfurt, Terminal 2 closed in June 2026 for a refurbishment lasting years, and its airlines moved into the new Terminal 3 at Frankfurt Airport. BER is going the other way: the Terminal 2 that stood empty for a year and a half after it was finished is now a fixed part of operations, filled by three low-cost airlines. For you, only the short list from the top matters. Ryanair, Vueling and Wizz Air fly from T2; everyone else from T1. And if your return flight lands in Stuttgart, the route from the belt to the city is in Stuttgart Airport arrivals. Everything here reflects the position in September 2026 according to Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH and the VBB. Terminal allocations, machine opening times and the engineering works all change, so check your flight information the day before.